If you want to draw your own:http://www.allegro.cc/depot/AllegroFontEditor/Has some sample fonts already, and can convert/import from Windows fonts - however you can't expect to convert a TrueType vectorial font to 16x16 monochrome and get clean result.

The image file that you load with load_font has to have a predefined format. See load_bitmap_font for details.

This is what a bitmap font looks like :{"name":"603086","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/b\/7b3347e6b61ddbc2b05c03d2f7c4a965.png","w":296,"h":140,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/b\/7b3347e6b61ddbc2b05c03d2f7c4a965"}

I can't get the bitmap generator to have orange background and letters on pink background.

The space between letters is supposed to be bright yellow (r,g,b)=(255,255,0) and the background for each letter is supposed to be magic pink(255,0,255). Save the file as a 24 bit bitmap. Make sure each row of letters lines up vertically - they all have to have the same height too. I don't think you have to have every character, but it should be at least 96 characters worth (of potentially empty magic pink rectangles).

Fonts are subject to copyright, so if you run TTF2PCX over a font from your Windows install, and distribute it with your game, you may be violating that font's copyright. Best use a font you know to be free.

If you use Allegro 5 with the TTF add-on enabled, you can save yourself the hassle and load TTF fonts (and a truckload of other formats) directly.

You're probably not seeing anything because you don't have the letters in the correct order. Take another look at the bitmap font I showed you earlier. load_bitmap_font reads from left to right, top to bottom. You have capital A starting in the second position when it should start in the 34th position. Also, you might want to make your magic pink rectangles slightly taller so that no letters fall off the edge. If they even load that way, they will likely be cut off so you only have a partial letter when you print it on the screen. Also, the top of each row has to have the same y value, as well as the bottom of each row. And the height of each row has to be the same.

From the command line, type FontMaker.exe --help or just FontMaker.exe to see the usage information. FontMaker will create a new font template with or without text, with characters any size 4x4 or greater and as .bmp, .pcx, or .tga files.

Not at this time, no. I suppose I could add an option to load a bitmap font from a file and use that as the font, but it would only be good for resizing a font, although that might be handy. You could do the same thing within your program though, by calling CreateFontBitmap and specifying a different font, and then saving the resulting bitmap.